How to Improve Your Customer Experience With the Right Business Products and Services

To improve customer experience through business products and services, businesses should understand customer needs, foster a customer-centric culture, provide personalized interactions, build omnichannel support, provide robust self-service options, actively collect customer feedback, use customer journey mapping to anticipate needs, and optimize customer experience software and AI.

Customer experience (CX) is a broad word that encompasses everything an organization does to support, engage, and delight customers during the evaluation, purchasing, and post-purchase stages. A good or bad customer experience can be a critical differentiator for firms. Providing a pleasant customer experience entails prioritizing customer demands in such a way that they remain involved and satisfied with the company, ultimately inspiring loyalty.

Behind the scenes, customer experience activities are supported by a variety of software systems and technologies, including as customer relationship management software, cloud services, and AI and machine learning-powered chatbots.

According to research, if we experience excellent customer service, we will recommend it to two or three others. However, if we receive poor treatment, we will inform ten to twelve other people!

Because word of mouth and internet recommendations and referrals are frequently important drivers of new business, all businesses should try to provide consistently good service standards. With that in mind, here are some practical strategies for improving customer service in your business:

1. Understand customer needs

The more you get to know your customers, the more you are likely to understand customer needs and expectations. Hence, give some thought to:

• What we currently know about each of our customers.
• How helpful is this information? What else would be helpful for us to know so we can better match their needs to our products and services?
• Who else has insights about our customers that could help us? For example, there may be long serving team members who have highly established customer relationships that can shed more insights.
• Where do we store this information? Also consider how safe and compliant this storage of information is.
• What tools do we have access to that can help us capture important customer information? For example, there are simple spreadsheets to full CRM systems that can help you capture and keep up to date this information.

Get your team to help you retrieve and store this valuable information. After that, give some thought to how your product or service could better suit their needs.

Further tips are provided in understanding customer needs and expectations. This will help you find the right ways to meet customer aspirations and improve customer service.

2. Seek and promote customer feedback

There are many ways to find out what your customers think about the organisation. Firstly, identify which methods are the most viable and rewarding for you. These could include:

• Giving customers the opportunity to provide testimonials and on-line reviews.
• Personally asking customers their views after they have used your product or service. For example by phone, face to face or in writing.
• Providing a very short, simple feedback form or survey with an incentive to complete. The easier and shorter to complete the survey, the more responses you are likely to receive.
• Inviting regular customers to share their views of your organisation on an individual basis. Some will be willing and eager to help you, especially if you want to build on the things they like and value you for.

3. Set and communicate clear service standards

Set some simple customer service standards that team members can easily understand and implement. You can also include the team members themselves in this process if you’re seeking total engagement.

When setting customer service standards, consider:

• The tone and type of language that best represents your values and service ethics. For example, formal versus informal style of language.
• Your main customer contact point, so there is a consistency of approach throughout the customer experience.
• Support processes needed to ensure the consistent delivery of these standards. For example, customer communication templates.
• Resources available, such as staffing levels and technology.
• Realistic timescales for delivering customer service, especially at your busiest times. For example, answering the telephone within three rings.

4. Delight your customers by exceeding their expectations

How frequently are your consumers happy to receive something greater than they expected and of value to them? Surprising your consumer in this manner, as long as their essential needs are addressed, can result in customer gratitude and future loyalty.

To begin, consider celebrating consumers’ important events and occasions, as well as significant milestones in client loyalty. Second, an extension of the product or service they’ve already purchased.

Customers frequently allude to special or additional ‘touches’ in their local or online communities. This can greatly improve your trustworthiness and promote new recommendations to your organisation.

5. Capture and share examples of great service

Determine the best strategy to collect client feedback throughout the organization. You can also include feedback from peers and managers who see a team member providing excellent customer service. From here, you may create a toolkit of best practices for your organisation.

Customer feedback can also be used to support an Employee Recognition Scheme, which recognizes the individual or team that provided great service.

Read Also: Top 10 Business Services for Business Growth and Scaling

Employees who receive this type of recognition are more likely to ‘go the additional mile’ for their clients. They also understand that their efforts are being recognized in this manner by their employer.

6. Create easy and effortless customer service

Follow your customer’s journey, from the way customers find and buy your organisation’s service and products, to billing and after sales support. In particular, look for ways of streamlining customer service processes at each stage of their journey.

Take a look at:

• The ease in which a customer can find your organisation.
• The clarity in which we articulate what we do as a business. How easy is it to understand from a lay persons point of view?
• The number of ways a customer can contact you and how accessible you are on a 24/7 basis. For example, by telephone, email, live chat, social media, or web site contact form.
• Any barriers and time delays customers experience in getting a response from you.

The quicker and easier it is for the customer to buy your products and services, the more likely they are to use your service in the first instance.

Successful businesses:

• Explain clearly without jargon how their products and services work and will be delivered to the customer.
• Pre-empt customer questions by explaining what to expect at every stage of the customer journey. This avoids customers asking similar questions about your products and services.
• Pre-empt, resolve and permanently eliminate potential product and service problems for the customer.

In conclusion, the more effortless you make your service, the more repeat customers you are likely to retain.

Some research shows that customers opt for ease first, rather than just relying on a previously good experience to make their next purchase.

7. Personalise your customer service

Take time to engage with your customers to find out what their needs really are. As a result, you will be able to provide customers with the product or service options to fully meet their needs. This will really help, as you strive to improve customer service standards.

In order to achieve a personalised service, consider how well your team members:

• Greet your customers and make them feel welcome.
• Respond in a way appropriate to the customer’s personality and lifestyle.
• Use your customer’s name.
• Ask open questions to find out their needs.
• Really listen and reflect back to the customer a summary of their needs.
• Appear genuinely interested in the customer as well as their situation.
• Pick up seamlessly from a previous colleague’s conversation with the customer.
• Demonstrate empathy when the customer shares a difficult or poor experience.
• Go out of their way to find the best solution for the customer.

Personalising service in this way will also help you build trust with your customers. In addition, there are many tools such as CRM systems that enable you to capture relevant client historical information.

Along with the provision of training and coaching; reinforced with great performance recognition, you can embed this level of personalised customer service and customer loyalty.

8. Invest in customer service training

Choose a training provider who will truly get to know your company and can support your business strategy and service expectations. A skilled and engaging training provider will be able to help you and your team give individualized, tailored customer service in a sustainable manner.

Alternatively, you might create your own internal customer service training program to emphasize the importance of customer service, product knowledge, and abilities among the team members.

Our customer service training ideas include a variety of practical activities and exercises. Your training provider should be able to assist and guide you in choosing the appropriate activities to attain your objectives in the most efficient manner.

You may also want to train your team leaders to provide regular bite-sized customer service training sessions. This can be used with their normal team briefing sessions.

Finally, give the team leaders the resources they need to present these bite-sized lessons. For example, provide laminated cards, posters, activities, exercises, goods, and training materials.

9. Analyse customer concerns and complaints

Get to the root cause of your customers’ concerns and complaints to find out what is going wrong and why. It will help if you have a structured system for storing all customer feedback, concerns and complaints.

Once you have the information stored together, review the data and ask yourself:

• What patterns are emerging?
• When do these complaints mainly occur?
• How are customers registering their concerns and complaints?
• In the main, what is letting us down? e.g. people, processes, policies?

Share this data with representatives in your organisation who are best placed to provide the broadest of insights into why these complaints may be happening.

Most importantly, before any review meeting set some guiding principles to ensure participants contribute in the most effective way.

For example, ‘we will listen to and respect all contributions, we will look at the data objectively and with the intention of building on what we currently do well’.

10. Make it easy for customers to complain

Consider how easy is it for your customers to make their concerns and complaints known to you. An easy process will capture the full extent of your customers’ experiences and enable you to really improve customer service. You will also help prevent future customer complaints.

Most customer focused organisations, dependent upon their size, have a transparent complaint handling process that it understood at all levels. There are usually three stages:

• Stage 1 maps out how front-line staff will initially respond to the customer complaint. This will normally include what they will say in response to customer feedback, concerns or objections and different severity of complaint. It will also include the response timescales and what the next steps will be.
• Stage 2 forms part of an escalation process to a team leader or manager, mapping out how the complaint will be dealt with. This stage is normally activated when the customer is either not happy with the initial front-line response or has written in to complain.
• Stage 3 usually involves the most senior manager to objectively review the whole complaint and how the complaint has been handed internally. They will make a final decision on behalf of the organisation to either uphold the original decision at stage 2 or to offer a different solution to the customer.

Set some clear boundaries of responsibilities in handling the complaint. Alongside this, map out the level of compensation an individual at each stage has the authority to offer customers.

Complaint handling review

Finally, conduct a periodic review on how effective your complaint handling process is at each stage to identify improvements that can be made. Take a look at our tips for handling customer complaints. Also consider some remedial training and coaching.

11. Find out what’s really going on

Shadow team members in the organisation to find out what is really going on. Choose different functions and team members that will give you the whole view of how customer needs are being fulfilled within the organisation.

Then on several occasions observe and work closely with these staff members. This will show you how your systems and processes affect the customer.

Importantly, it will also identify what obstacles get in the way of delivering consistent high levels of customer service. Hence choose team members who are open and keen to support the initiative.

Some large organisations go a step further and go ‘under cover’ as either a new employee or customer to gain these insights.

12. Check out your competitors

Give your staff the opportunity to see what level of customer service your competitors are offering. You may even include other organisations that are not competitors but are known to offer great customer service.

Once your staff have reviewed your competitors, get them to share their experience with the rest of the team. From these insights, you can identify the best practice ideas that you want to adopt within your own organisation.

To improve the customer experience, customer segmentation and persona mapping can be used, as well as personalized interactions to recommend suitable products or services and analytics to study consumer behavior and tailor experiences accordingly.